Virtualized computing services are a way to reduce computing costs and/or provide a more robust computing environment. Using virtualized computing services, a customer may be able to purchase computing resources for a given period of time, for example. Moreover, a virtualized computing service provider may provide a service level agreement (SLA) guaranteeing a certain level of reliability. While virtualized computing services have been available for some time, virtualized computing service implementations have adjusted with changing technology.
With the advent of the Internet, the access of computing resources over a network has given rise to the notion that computational power may become increasingly similar to a utility. Browsers, for instance, may be implemented with reduced computational resources, while servers providing pages to such browsers may be configured to perform more complex computational processes in generating such pages. In this way, more compute intensive processing may take place somewhere in the network away from a client device, while the local processing on the client device may be simply rendering the results delivered over the network, for example. Transcoding, optical character recognition (OCR), voice recognition and web services are just a few examples of computational applications that may be provided as a service somewhere on a network with a utility-like interface.